On 24/11/17 15:39, Peter Humphrey wrote: > Is there any guidance on setting up fetchmail on Gentoo to operate in this > way? I've searched in likely places but the Gentoo docs are long out of date > and others don't help much, so I still don't know what to add to /etc/ > conf.d/fetchmail, nor whether I need a ~/.fetchmailrc or an /etc/fetchmailrc > file (no sample comes with the ebuild).
If you run fetchmail as a daemon, then you need /etc/fetchmailrc. If you run it manually yourself, then you need ~/.fetchmailrc Read the docu, in particular the bit about whether or not to delete mails from the server. Set it to NOT delete mails, then you can test it knowing that you won't lose anything. I believe it keeps a log file of what it's downloaded, so for testing purposes you may want to find and delete that. And if you run it with the --verbose option, it'll tell you what it's doing. I generally pipe that through the "tee" command, so I can see whether it's doing what I expect, then I can examine the output in more detail to check. Beyond that, I would say you're doing a right thing. fetchmail is good software. The only reason I'm not using it is MySQL broke, which took out my virtual usernames, which broke postfix and fetchmail delivery :-( And I've never got round to fixing MySQL. Cheers, Wol
